e-Marketing: Profiting from a customer's lifetime experience
Source: eyeforpharma.com

At the recent e-Sales and Marketing for Pharma USA 2002 conference in Philadelphia, Philippe Barzin, Director of Connectivity for Johnson & Johnson, told delegates when it comes to e-marketing in today's pharmaceutical landscape, he and his colleagues are moving from a pure technology play toward more strategic marketing. Because traditional marketing approaches are becoming less effective, Barzin said Johnson & Johnson is looking toward more innovative marketing channels, some of which will continue to be e-channels. (11/22/2002)

"It's a little bit of a repositioning," Barzin said. "And it's certainly getting closer to the marketing people. One of the hottest topics that still remains within our company - and where you see a lot of e-business people going - is the idea of CRM. But are we really talking about CRM or HRM - healthcare relationship management?

"You have a complex mix of physicians, provider organizations, patients, payers, employers - and they influence each other's decisions and it's a challenge to untangle," he explained. "From my standpoint, that's very different from the traditional retail example of Customer Relationship Management. In our case, it's far more complex to identify who your customer really is."

According to Barzin, whatever you choose to call it, your goals really should center on knowing your customer inside and out and understanding how to customize your offer to create an easy, pleasant, seamless and effective experience for them. To achieve these goals, Barzin suggests looking at the marketing cycle in five basic steps.

"The idea, first, is to attract - to get traffic," he advised. "Going where the eyeballs are, is probably the most important thing in your marketing plan. If you don't go where the eyeballs are, it's going to cost you a lot of money and effort to get any kind of attraction.

"Once you have the eyeballs, make them interact with you - make them ask for your patient brochure, for your sales rep," Barzin said. "Or better yet, make them become an ambassador of yours by giving them tools to become your ambassador. Then, make them come back - remind them during your conferences and via offline resources like snail mail or through your sales customer service representative. And last, learn from your customers - know as much as possible - and measure, measure, measure."

Barzin believes his experiences with Six Sigma methodologies come into play when it comes to measuring. "We measure all that we're doing and that helps us set up the expectations correctly, and track very precisely the progress we're making. But in the end it's about delivering the value. And that's where you demonstrate you can walk the talk and you connect your online activities with your offline customer care."

Personalization, according to Barzin, is another important dimension. "From our standpoint, personalization is the dynamic creation of an interaction based on who the customer is, what she's doing and why she's coming to the site," he said. "It centers on anticipating the needs of the customer in order to establish relevancy quicker, inform more efficiently, simulate one-on-one interaction and streamline customer care processes. It is not an invasion of individual privacy; gathering information to be shared. It's not solely transaction-based and it's certainly not a nice tool that is place on a Web site."

Barzin believes J&J's J&Jgateway.com is a good example of the first step toward personalization. "It is community driven," he explained. "In other words, if you're a surgeon, the likelihood that you have to interact with a multitude of J&J companies is very high and we don't want to force you to go from one Web site to another to find the information you need. So, we generated J&Jgateway and said just come and say you're a surgeon, and we'll push content which is appropriate to your specialty so that it's a little more customer-centric than a traditional product site."

Sites like Lillydiabetes.com, Barzin persuaded, illustrate the next step toward the customer. "Lillydiabetes.com goes one step further, allowing visitors to register with the site and expanding the interactivity. But what I think we should aim for is really the one-to-one marketing. One example, in one of the companies of J&J, is arthritis.com, where basically the user maintains his own profile and you really create an outside/inside approach."

One stumbling block to adopting more customer-centric marketing approaches, according to Barzin, is whether your organization's internal processes are up to the challenge. "If you don't have your IM people, or your regulatory people or your customer service people on board with your project, you better forget about personalization," he recommended. "But if you're ready for it, it's going to impact your business."

Barzin believes one low-cost, high-return way to jumpstart your healthcare relationship management efforts is with a self-help knowledge base. "You have to think about your call center and your customers calling to get answers," he suggested. "The first thing you should look at is inquiries per day. This is something that fluctuates. You have two problems with this. First you have more inquiries at some times than your service can handle and this is a problem because you make your customers wait to get an answer.

"At other times, you have more capacity than the number of inquiries and that creates internal problems because now your management is very unhappy because you have idle assets there," Barzin continued. "So, the idea of a self-help knowledge base is to align those two. You are changing your customer service support in the sense that you first change your voice response unit to say 'our next available agent is going to be with you in a minute,' or whatever your capacity is at that time, 'but if you'd like, please visit our Web site at ... to find the answers to your question.'"

The idea, according to Barzin, is to offer multiple options for answering a customer's questions. In addition, the self-help database incorporates a "smart sensor" that interprets the customer's mood. "In other words, if a customer is asking a question, but they're typing in all capital letters, that is sensed by the machine as an irate customer and is automatically escalated to the proper level within the organization," he explained. "Likewise, if you use certain key words - and I can let your imagination work on that - you would also have proper escalation of the interaction."

According to Barzin, such a system also can dynamically rank the questions being asked by a given customer, allowing you to keep a pulse on your customer's needs. "You know exactly what the most important questions are for them - what is relevant," Barzin said. "From a marketing standpoint, what I find interesting is you would focus on trying to preempt those questions. In other words, adjust your marketing communication strategy so that it's preempting those questions before they happen.

"When it comes to healthcare relationship management, I think that using an ESP is an easy way to create valuable user support," he continued. "It's also a way to leverage your hotline talents because your people on the phone only end up connected with the customer when the question becomes much more complex. And that's something the hotline people love because it's using more of their brain and talent."

But according to Barzin, such programs are just the beginning to establishing a customer lifetime experience. He points to online communities such as babycenter.com as a model for establishing long-term relationships with customers. The site, designed to provide expectant mothers and their families with pregnancy-related information, tailors its content to each given stage of pregnancy and beyond.

"What I love about babycenter from a strategic standpoint is that it combines the three medical C's of the Web - content, community and commerce," Barzin told attendees. "Now what I've found phenomenal with this is that it's a beautiful example of marketing from the cradle to grave. The idea is to syndicate the content. If there is something I've learned from my e-business experience is how hard it is to bring compelling content over and over again and finding the experts to give you that content."

In closing, Barzin recommended marketers remember their audience has multiple choices and they're not limited to online ones. He also stressed the importance of focusing on processes rather than the technology and setting up the right expectations when it comes to ROI measurements. "Build a solid strategic plan and think about it from a customer lifetime experience - and bring new value," he advised.

If you would like to order the presentations and transcripts for this conference please email jgardner@eyeforpharma.com or ring +44 20 7375 7563